Pawel Olszczynski | Fantôme Noir
18 Mar - 23 Apr 2011
French critic Nino Frank is often given credit for coining the term “film noir” to describe a group of American crime films that were shown in French theaters in the forties. He allegated that the novelty of film noir is that it shifts the burden from the action to creating expressive model characters e.g.: the detective in
a trench coat or a demonic femme fatale in a satin dress with a cigarette in her hand. In his drawings Pawel Olszczynski goes one step further—he abandons the characters and focuses on their props. These elements usually appear alone, without “ownership“—a glove moving along the railing waving limply, revealing that is empty, filled only with associations, Untitled (Empty Glove). In Olszczynski’s work items of clothing subjectively become phantoms of bodies. It is his private world – a fantôme noir. Olszczynski’s drawings are therefore the opposite of the classic study of the model. He is occupied only with what surfaces: drapes, folds, heels, hair styles and everything that fetishizes. For the artist fashion is language of Baudrillard pyramidal simulacrum. It is fetish and artificial. And it is the superficiality of fashion that fascinates him.
The world of fashion has long reached far into areas of art. Many designers like Rei Kawakubo, Martin Maison Margiela or Gareth Pugh are inspired by artworks, and their collections are often reminiscent of collectable objects or sculptures. Olszczynski asks, however, what happens if we reverse the direction of fascination, if the art falls in love with the fashion? His paper sculptures are made up of wigs, purses and wallets and refer to haute couture in fashion. They are as fragile and as transitory as fashion trends. He plays with exclusivity of the handmade which in the art world is self-evident. He is fascinated by black and the possilibites of the ordinary pencil—sometimes deep black, soft and velvety, and at others dry, precise and thin as a hair. He also radically juxtaposes the texture of materials like skin, fur and hair. Olszczynski pulls his favorite motif from fashion magazines which depict unnaturally styled hair–fetishes once again.
He continually returns to this motif while at the same time consciously celebrating the ritual of the obsessive, compulsive repetition, which manifests itself in a pushy quest for perfected execution. The process of creating drawings is time consuming and laborious—physically and mentally exhausting. The hair on Olszczynski’s works is tangled, dominating the entire surface of the sheet. While repetition should satisfy, it provokes anxiety and a feeling of helplessness.
In Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the author writes (...) the compulsion to repeat stems from what has been denied and has appeared in the unconscious. (...) But what is the relation of the pleasure principles with the compulsion to repeat that reveals the power of denial? It’s obvious that most of what becomes revived as a result of forced repetition is unpleasant to our ego, as it actualizes the functions of the denied drives; it is however distress which we have already appreciated and which does not contradict the pleasure principle, a distress for one system, connected with a simultaneous satisfaction of another.
Olszczynski’s strategy is to analyze the drawing medium. His works are a kind of visual tautology: on a piece of paper you see a piece of drawn paper, folded like a sheet of paper, Untitled (Sheet of Paper), or the drawing of hair that he shapes into the likeness of hair or a wig. The artist builds objects with his drawings. Ironically, this practice of repetition exposes the limits of mimesis. The more Olszczynski tries to convince us that a picture is reality, the more it is impossible. As a reward, however, he reveals the natural characteristics of the drawing medium.
Pawel Olszczynski was born in 1985 in Cracow. He lives and works in Cracow, Poland.
The world of fashion has long reached far into areas of art. Many designers like Rei Kawakubo, Martin Maison Margiela or Gareth Pugh are inspired by artworks, and their collections are often reminiscent of collectable objects or sculptures. Olszczynski asks, however, what happens if we reverse the direction of fascination, if the art falls in love with the fashion? His paper sculptures are made up of wigs, purses and wallets and refer to haute couture in fashion. They are as fragile and as transitory as fashion trends. He plays with exclusivity of the handmade which in the art world is self-evident. He is fascinated by black and the possilibites of the ordinary pencil—sometimes deep black, soft and velvety, and at others dry, precise and thin as a hair. He also radically juxtaposes the texture of materials like skin, fur and hair. Olszczynski pulls his favorite motif from fashion magazines which depict unnaturally styled hair–fetishes once again.
He continually returns to this motif while at the same time consciously celebrating the ritual of the obsessive, compulsive repetition, which manifests itself in a pushy quest for perfected execution. The process of creating drawings is time consuming and laborious—physically and mentally exhausting. The hair on Olszczynski’s works is tangled, dominating the entire surface of the sheet. While repetition should satisfy, it provokes anxiety and a feeling of helplessness.
In Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the author writes (...) the compulsion to repeat stems from what has been denied and has appeared in the unconscious. (...) But what is the relation of the pleasure principles with the compulsion to repeat that reveals the power of denial? It’s obvious that most of what becomes revived as a result of forced repetition is unpleasant to our ego, as it actualizes the functions of the denied drives; it is however distress which we have already appreciated and which does not contradict the pleasure principle, a distress for one system, connected with a simultaneous satisfaction of another.
Olszczynski’s strategy is to analyze the drawing medium. His works are a kind of visual tautology: on a piece of paper you see a piece of drawn paper, folded like a sheet of paper, Untitled (Sheet of Paper), or the drawing of hair that he shapes into the likeness of hair or a wig. The artist builds objects with his drawings. Ironically, this practice of repetition exposes the limits of mimesis. The more Olszczynski tries to convince us that a picture is reality, the more it is impossible. As a reward, however, he reveals the natural characteristics of the drawing medium.
Pawel Olszczynski was born in 1985 in Cracow. He lives and works in Cracow, Poland.